Earth Colony Sentinel (Galactic Arena Book 2)

by Dan Davis

  Her heart beat so hard she had to fight for breath.

  She fed three more epipods into the suit and confirmed she wanted them and accepted the certain death that would follow.

  All she needed was a few objective seconds of life. That would be enough to get through the pulsing, collapsing shockwaves out into space. If Sheila could not be properly restored and made functional the Sentinel could collect the shuttle, bring it in and treat Seti and Stirling. Just a few seconds to get through.

  The pace of the flickering slowed as her ERANS peaked. Flares popped in the blackness like fat raindrops on asphalt. Through it all, she could make out the glow of engines from the dozens of drones racing to cause damage or to prevent it. It was not worth sending a distress call. It would never get through and even if it did, no one would be able to do anything until the battle was over.

  There.

  A gap in the deep, shifting perimeter. It was not there yet. It was a swirling ball of gases but they would dissipate and the waves would pass through each other in time for her to slip through the resulting gap.

  Assuming another missile was not in her path, undetected, waiting to detonate just as the Lepus passed it.

  Wrestling control back of herself and her raging adrenaline, she finished correcting the tumbling of the shuttle with the RCS and the gimbaled engines and set a loping course though the chains and ribbons of dumb slugs.

  The rail gun rounds hit her anyway. A series punched right through her hull, crashing subsystems and venting shuttle fluids and gases.

  Kat could not breathe. A severe pain in her chest hit her in waves. At first, she assumed she had been killed by a huge bullet and yet, when she glanced down, her suit and her body were intact.

  Heart attack.

  Whether Stirling and Seti were still alive in the back, she had no idea. Pain overwhelmed her. She hoped that they would live. She hoped that the Sentinel would win. She hoped that they would pick up the Marines.

  She hoped.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Milena lay in Ram’s arms in their bed in the low light. It was late and they had to get up but neither wanted to go anywhere. Not only did he not want to get up, Ram would have happily stayed precisely where he was forever, feeling her skin on his.

  “Cassidy’s really trying to take you down,” Milena said, her voice low. “Take you out completely.”

  Ram sighed. “Can we just not talk about it for a few minutes?”

  She shifted her body against him, her skin rapidly cooling wherever it was not touching his. “If not now, when?”

  Of course, she was right. Always, Milena was right. It was she who had warned him of the enemies he had on the Victory and with her advice he had made it all the way from the wormhole to the approach to the planet Arcadia. She had someone in the Marines feeding her information, and someone in the civilian command structure, and probably a few others that she trusted. Even though she was no computer engineer, she had created some programs to sniff out relevant data from the ship network. Data about who was meeting with who, and whether those meetings were recorded officially or not. Combined with her enormously high IQ and well developed deductive reasoning, she had discerned threats from their supposed comrades weeks and even months before anything happened. Without her watching his back, he would have fallen foul of one of Cassidy and Zuma’s plans far earlier. Plans to sideline Ram, plans to refuse his entry to the Corps and then the officer training program.

  But this was another level.

  “I can’t see why they would even want to kill me,” Ram said. “If Cassidy and Zuma want to take over, they’ll have to kill Zhukov and Captain Tamura. Not me. I have no power. Removing me serves no purpose.”

  She ran the fingers of one hand over the ridges of his stomach. “They never wanted you. And you constantly challenge them, especially now you’re an officer in the Marine Corps. Despite Cassidy doing all he could to block you at every step of the way, you defied him and he feels both stifled and abandoned by his senior officers. He can’t get his own way with you. And I bet I know what else he’s thinking.”

  “I don’t doubt that you do.”

  She drove a fist into his ribs and Ram grinned while she continued. “He is wondering how long before some armchair admiral back on Earth or Howe himself will promote you to be Cassidy’s equal, in some way, or perhaps even his superior.”

  “Come on,” Ram said. “They wouldn’t be that stupid. Besides, I don’t want any additional responsibility. Second Lieutenant is plenty to get on with.”

  “One thing I have learned through all my years in UNOP,” she said, “is that gifted and highly trained leaders are perfectly capable of making incomprehensibly stupid decisions.”

  “Okay, let’s say I believe that Cassidy and Zuma will try to kill me. How could they commit a murder without the medical team discovering the fact of it? Poison? Gunshot suicide with two shots to the back of the head? They wouldn’t get away with it.”

  “Just watch your back,” Milena said. “That’s all I’m trying to say.”

  And that was the day that Bediako had tried to kill him.

  After a session of practicing hip throws, Ram and Bediako were alone in the small dojo in D6 and, because the training room had only the one door in or out, Ram made sure he kept on eye on that door at all times. But Bediako had swung a massive dumbbell into the back of Ram’s cranium with force enough to kill a grizzly bear.

  The blow was a terrible one, no doubt about that. Ram found himself on his knees and then falling forward onto his hands, head drooping. Drooping while he blinked away the stars from his vision far enough to see the blood streaming from the back of his head to pour onto the training mat like someone had left the faucet running.

  Another blow might have cracked the bone and smashed his brain stem but Bediako instead slipped his arms around Ram’s neck and squeezed.

  Even as dazed as he was, Ram intuitively understood that they were going to make his murder look like a training session gone bad.

  He fought back. He crushed Bediako’s face and throat by the time the Marines arrived to subdue him and Ram was enraged enough to take the same dumbbell and cave in the old bastard’s skull. All while witnesses stood in the doorway, helpless or fearful of intervening, lest they be killed, too.

  For a few hours, Ram wondered if it had been a Cassidy / Zuma plot or if Bediako had just decided to do it for his own reasons but then the dojo surveillance video showed Ram as the one instigating the assault. Someone had cleverly doctored the video and done so seamlessly and rapidly.

  In less than a day, he was strapped into Dr. Fo’s surgery chair.

  “You going to scoop out my brains, Doc?” Ram asked him.

  “There’s really no need for the false bravado,” Dr. Fo had said. “The procedure will merely block your recall of events over these last months.”

  “So, it’s reversible?” Ram said, a glimmer of hope forming.

  Dr. Fo sighed. “Yes, I suppose so, but I don’t know how I would do it.”

  “How can you not know? You’re lying. Doing what Zuma tells you to do, like a lapdog. Tell me.”

  “Your memories before the Orb were precisely recorded and then transferred to this new body, do you see? And all the memories you made since then are therefore rather easily discernable. All I have to do is deny them integration using the scan to identify the points which is relayed to the digital cell swarm for the blocker layer to be overlaid. I would expect the blockers to wear away over time.”

  “How much time?”

  “Impossible to say for certain. Months, even years.”

  “What can I do to fix it?” Ram said. “I can’t wait that long to get myself back.”

  Fo sighed. “It’s possible that overwhelming emotional trauma could do it. A massive hormone response could interfere with it. But your endocrine system is a disaster area already, so, who knows?”

  Milena was at his side. “Remember me,” she kept saying. “I love
you. Remember me.”

  “I will,” he promised. “I will.”

  ***

  There was something looming over him. Shapes. Ram tried to raise a hand to fend them off but he could not move.

  My arm. I lost my arm, it burned up. Where am I?

  “Easy, Lieutenant.”

  An old man’s voice.

  “Colonel Mathieson?”

  “His mind is intact,” the colonel said. “You people really do know what you’re doing.”

  An unseen voice responded. “Very amusing, I’m sure.”

  “Dr. Fo?” Ram said. It came out wrong, half moan and half croak. “What happened? Where are we?”

  It took them a while but they brought him round. Elevated his bed into a half upright, reclined position and gave him a hit of something that woke him up. Ram came back to himself enough to look around the unfamiliar room. He noted the medical and military personnel, the dimensions of the walls and ceiling, the scrubbed whiteness all around. And he knew he was back on the Sentinel, undergoing medical care.

  “Seems like I spend a lot of time in medical beds, speaking to important people like you, Colonel,” Ram said. The colonel nodded and opened his mouth to respond but Ram cut him off. “You lied to me. You tricked me into that mission with a lie.”

  Milena really is dead. Always was.

  The pain of it hit him fully. When he had not recalled their life together, she was just a friend, a close colleague. A brilliant and beautiful woman who was an idea more than a real person. An aspirational woman. He had suffered the loss of someone who wasn’t real.

  With the memories all there, she was suddenly real. He had known her and she had known him. They had hundreds of shared moments, nights spent together, meals taken together. Her rare smile, her rarer laugh. Learning how to tease her and to relax when he realized she truly did like him, then love him.

  And she was gone. Ram had failed to protect her and failed to rescue her in time.

  Maybe it would have been better to not remember her at all.

  Maybe.

  Colonel Mathieson stared down at him. “You are quite right. I did lie. I can apologize, personally. I take no pleasure and no pride in it. In lying to you, manipulating you. But the mission comes first. Humanity comes first. I sacrifice my pride and my personal and professional morality for the survival of humanity. I would happily spend my own life to defend our civilization and I spend yours and all my men’s lives for the same reason. But I take no pride in it.”

  Ram scoffed. “Why am I even surprised? You people bred me in secret, you cut off my head, abducted me, used me over and over. I should not be surprised.” Ram’s mouth was dry. He licked his lips. “But you did it so easily. So effortlessly. And I fell for it completely. I’m the idiot for trusting you.”

  “It does not reflect poorly on you, you know.” The Colonel shrugged. “We have rather mastered psychological manipulation. Yes, we used you. We fed that dolt Dr. Isaacs with a few suggestions and he repeated what we wanted him to repeat. He believed he saw what he said he saw. You needed no more than a little nudge. You are a man who feels a powerful urge to rescue the damsel in distress. That’s nothing to be ashamed about, that’s a very positive trait. Simply one that was easy to exploit, that’s all. Don’t beat yourself up over it. All I wanted was to get you on that shuttle so you could protect the deployment of the device in case the internal space was protected by alien infantry. I hoped that you would read your sealed orders, meet no resistance and get away on the shuttle.”

  Ram remembered the churning cascade of wheelers, blowing them apart with his weapon, cutting them to pieces with his sword.

  That giant creature. The monstrous great hive queen.

  “What was that thing?” Ram said, trying and failing to sit up. “That giant alien. Did anyone tell you about—” he broke off, coughing. Someone slipped a straw in his mouth and he sipped at cold water. Ram caught sight of the H-gel wrap that encased the stump where his elbow used to be. He spluttered with the water and relaxed his head back down on the pillow. “What about the giant alien that—”

  The colonel raised a hand, shutting Ram up. “The shielded suit cameras plus the shuttle sensors recorded the alien creature and streamed the data to the shuttle black box. Most of the images were degraded, either from the time of recording or due to issues with storage of the data. The wheelers are really quite liberal with their deployment of radiation-based weaponry and defensive system. Anyway, we pieced it together. It surprised a lot of the scientists and then we worked hard to get the whole story from Red. There are a lot of problems with the translation and I’m sure we are misunderstanding a lot but we have the general picture.”

  “Okay.”

  The colonel continued. “On the wheeler planet, there evolved two intelligent races.” Dr. Fo made a polite coughing sound from the other side of the bed and the colonel shrugged. “Alright, one intelligent race evolved, which were the warlocks. That’s the UNOP reporting name currently assigned to the giant aliens. Warlock. The warlock race evolved and they were probably served by the wheelhunters, in the same way that homo sapiens society developed alongside wolves, turning them into dogs.”

  Dr. Fo cleared his throat again and was this time unable to hold his tongue. “That is merely a possibly analogous situation, we do not actually know if that accurately reflects the situation, even loosely. And we are certain that the wheelhunters are far more intelligent than dogs but whether that is a result of uplifting by the warlock race to genetically improve them by artificial selection or by gene editing, we simply do not know at this point. But it is most fascinating. Most fascinating.”

  “Uplifting?” Ram said but they ignored him.

  “Thank you, doctor,” Colonel Mathieson said, his tone barely civil. “You don’t need to worry about any of that right now, Ram, you just focus on getting better.”

  “Wait a second,” Ram said. “You knew about the alien, didn’t you. The big one. I bet Red told you about it before we even boarded and that’s why Red wanted to go. Then you concocted the bullshit about Milena being a prisoner.” Ram looked at Fo, who pretended to be reading from a screen. That was when Ram knew for certain he was right. “Did Red tell you to kill the leader before the battle? Did you think the bomb wouldn’t be enough? Why did you not tell me the truth, I would have gone anyway, to kill that thing.”

  Colonel Mathieson breathed in sharply through his nose, held it and breathed out of his mouth. “Okay. We had an idea that it might be the case but we could not be sure. There were so many misunderstandings between Red and us that we honestly had no idea if he was trying to screw us over by going back to his people. But we took a chance. And your profile said you would be less likely to go if it was an assassination mission.”

  “I would have gone anyway.”

  The colonel said nothing.

  “Did you make me go after Red, when he ignored orders to return to the shuttle?”

  “You did that all on your own. He appreciates it, by the way. I think you made a lifelong fan right there.”

  On my own? Do I even have any free will anymore? When was the last free choice I ever made? Have I ever had one to make?”

  Ram’s head hurt, so he was willing to let it go. “What about Stirling? And Kat?”

  “The sergeant lives. Injured, badly. Like you, in many ways. But he lives. As does the pilot, Lieutenant Xenakis. She experienced a severe reaction to the substances she took to enhance her flying abilities. She intentionally overdosed so that she could get you all out of there. On the other hand, her recovery will be swifter and more complete than yours as she was not hit by the Wildfire’s energy weapon and she spent a lot of time in the Lepus’s cockpit, which is pretty heavily shielded.”

  “Good,” Ram said. “That’s good.” He took a shaking breath and felt his heart fluttering in his chest. A profound weakness settled in his limbs. Even his vision was blurred. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “You lost an arm, s
on. You have broken bones, swollen organs, internal bleeding. Brain damage. Nothing that can’t be fixed. The doctors will grow you a new arm and if it doesn’t take we’ll get you a state of the art prosthetic with enormous power and strength, integrated with your nervous system of course and with full sensation and—”

  “Sir,” Ram said. “Colonel Mathieson? Dr. Fo?”

  The colonel broke off. He looked at Dr. Fo and the doctor looked at Ram.

  “I remember everything,” Ram said, licking his dry lips. “Dr. Fo, I imagine that you told the colonel what happened, if he didn’t know already? But yeah, I remember that Captain Cassidy and old Director Zuma tried to have me killed. Wanted me out of the way so they got Bediako to try to kill me. When I killed him instead, they framed me as a murderer and a faulty model. I’m basically an artificial person anyway, right? What does it matter if my rights are taken away? I was made so I could be unmade just as easily. I’m sure it was an easy argument to make. They had my memory blocked. That’s a kind of murder, isn’t it? They killed who I was, stole from me my entire relationship with Milena so that I had no idea when I woke up. What we meant to each other. And now she’s—”

  He ran out of breath. Tried to calm himself.

  “At least Cassidy was killed. An ignominious end, too. Still, I wish I could have done it. I wish I could have torn his head from his shoulders with my own hands. But what about Zuma, does she live? Did she die in the final assault on the outpost? And Sergeant Major Gruger. I saved his life, carried him out of there and the whole time he was my enemy. I’m going to have to kill him, too.”

  What am I saying? I shouldn’t admit it to these men. What drugs am I on? I’m hurt bad. Am I dying?

  Neither men spoke for a moment until the colonel eased his ass onto the edge of Ram’s bed. He hesitated, staring off to a point over Ram’s head as if the colonel was wondering what to say or, perhaps, where to start.

  “We always knew we would need human innovation out here so far from home,” Mathieson said. “Innovation, creative problem solving from our engineers, scientists and from our Marines. Everything about our deployment out here is unconventional and we have had to design everything with flexibility in mind. We just did not know how to fight this enemy and we brought as many variables of weapons and equipment as could be made viable rather than commit to the wrong thing. Because of that, we emphasized creativity and unconventional thinking in our selection criteria for the Sentinel, not just in the officers but in every rank.”